


Dare to Care: The Debonair Affair of Darr and Dair

by AtypicalOwl



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Podfic Available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 00:18:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1837450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtypicalOwl/pseuds/AtypicalOwl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dairine gets a call from Darryl for wizardly tech-support. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as turning it on and off again. For one, he's also stuck in a tree.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dare to Care: The Debonair Affair of Darr and Dair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [222Ravens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/222Ravens/gifts).



In addition to its usual mess of papers, books, and action figures, Dairine’s desk was covered in screws, nuts, little bits of wood, and the odd washer. Dairine herself was balanced on her chair, trying to hold two fiddly bits together with one hand and reaching for the glue, which was out of the way on a shelf, with the other. For the umpteenth time, she lamented her choice of shoddy, Chinese-made model kits and considered just assembling the darned thing with wizardry, but she also dismissed the notion for the umpteenth time. If it were a personal project, she would have used wizardry to assemble it long ago, but since it was for school, she had to do it by hand. Wizardly ethics and moral boundaries and things like that.

Dairine almost had the elusive tube of glue within her grasp when a sharp tone interrupted her concentration. She overbalanced and toppled to the floor, muttering a few choice words under her breath as one of the fiddly pieces rolled under her desk.

“What is it?” She asked her bed, where the tone had come from.

“Message for you,” a voice came from somewhere around her pillow. “Consultation request, priority three.”

“Well, come on out of there so I can read it, will you?”

The blankets shifted, and a spindly eyestalk peeked out from under the wrinkled sheets. For a relatively featureless appendage, it looked peeved. “Do I have to? It’s warm here.”

Dairine rolled her eyes. Weren’t computers supposed to be more worried about overheating? “How long is the request?”

“Forty-three words.”

“You know how fast I read. You can come out of there for long enough for me to skim it, then go back to…” Dairine paused and frowned at Spot. “What are you doing, anyway? You know what, never mind. Just lemme read the thing.”

“But it’s warm.”

Dairine opened her mouth to argue, but decided it would ultimately be faster to play along. “Fine. You win.” Dairine picked herself up off the floor and shimmied under the blankets near the foot of the bed, then wormed her way to where Spot was, by her pillow. “Okay, we’re both warm. Could you show me the consult request?”

“Yes!”

It was a fairly generic request - “multiple errors with Manual device”, “requesting immediate technical assistance”, blah blah blah. Dairine jabbed the “accept” button before she even reached the end, where the requester’s signature would be.

The doorbell rang, startling Dairine again. “That was fast,” she muttered, fighting to untangle herself from the covers. Spot made a distressed noise when she flung the blankets off, so she paused to tuck him back in again.

That was her life, it seemed. Tucking her sentient computer in for a nap so it wouldn’t get cold.

Eh, she’d done weirder stuff.

Outside her front door was the wizard who needed a consult: a skinny, African-American kid who was grinning at her sheepishly. “Darryl!” Dairine said, surprised. “How are you? What can I do for you?” She waved him inside.

“Well, it’s kind of weird,” Darryl said, standing awkwardly in the hall and looking for all the world like he wanted to sink through the floor.

That made Dairine laugh. “We’re wizards, weird is normal.”

“My Wizpod is acting up.”

“That doesn’t sound too weird, tech happens.” Dairine glanced over her shoulder in the general direction of her room. “Spot! Sleepyhead! We’ve got a job!” She turned back to Darryl and said, “Just let me take a quick look at it and we’ll get it sorted out.”

“Well, it’s more complicated than that,” Darryl said.

“How so?”

“It’s stuck in a tree. And, um, so am I.”

Dairine blinked, then looked him up and down. He didn’t appear to be trailing any attached shrubbery, so how… “Ah,” she said. “Bilocation?”

“Yup. And I can’t get myself down, because it’s in the park, and there’s lots of people around who’d wonder about my twin showing up, or if I just up and vanished.”

“I see.”

“But it’s doing some really weird things and kind of freaking me out and I need it for more than just wizardry so it’s kind of an emergency and I really really need help getting it fixed and—”

Dairine held up a hand, and Darryl trailed off. “Where are you? I’ll get there ASAP.”

“Ohgoshthankyou!” Darryl said in a rush, bouncing on his heels and flapping his hands in excitement. “It’s the park near that new gas station they just built, the one with the red and grey slides and stuff.”

“Yeah, I know the one.”

“Okay great see you there thanks!” Darryl was abruptly not standing in front of her any more.

Dairine shook her head. “Still not used to that…”

A soft scuttling sound behind her announced Spot’s arrival. “What is the consult?” He asked, squinting at her with a lone eyestalk.

“Complicated, apparently.” Dairine said. “C’mon, we’re going to the park. Wizpod’s stuck up a tree, apparently.” She headed back to her room to get her shoes and a bag for Spot.

Spot’s CPU whirred in quiet contemplation as he followed her. Finally, he said “I am not equipped for this situation. I am a laptop, not a squirrel.”

Dairine rolled her eyes. “What you are is a smart alec. C’mon.” She gestured to the messenger bag she was holding.

Spot climbed into the messenger bag and tucked in all of his appendages. “At least it’s warm in here.” One of his fans turned on briefly in an approximation of a sigh.

Dairine spent most of the walk to the park pondering just how to ask Spot about his new penchant for finding warm places to enter sleep mode.

Early spring rains and unusually warm weather had coaxed the trees into early bloom, and when Dairine arrived at the park, she had no idea which ball of green contained a wizard and his malfunctioning Manual. She paused near a young birch, pretending to use it as support while she adjusted her shoe, and asked a squirrel in its branches if it had seen Darryl in one of the trees.

The squirrel happily pointed her to the opposite corner of the park, where the “little-big wizard guy” was enjoying the company of a maple.

Dairine nodded, thanked the squirrel, and started across the park. She had to dodge a couple little kids running around, having fun and enjoying the pleasant weather. When she reached the maple that the squirrel had pointed out, she looked up, and Darryl looked down at her with a wide grin.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” she said. “I’ll be up in a minute.” Darine paused for a moment. “Hi,” she said to the maple. Talking to trees was more Nita’s specialty, but it didn’t hurt to be polite.

“Hello,” the maple said.

“Hi,” Spot said, poking an eyestalk out of her bag.

Social greetings complete, Dairine set about figuring out how to get up the tree. It looked like a decent climbing tree, aside from the fact that the first branch was about a foot above her head. Tricky. Dairine wondered how had Darryl gotten up there in the first place. Maybe he just bilocated up there in the first place, no climbing necessary.

Settling her bag more comfortably across her shoulders, Dairine grabbed the branch and hauled herself up.

Or rather, she tried to. She managed to get herself about six inches off the ground before her arms said “Nope, we can’t do that, sorry.”

Above her, Darryl snickered. “You can help out at any time, arbor boy,” Dairine said, annoyed.

“More fun to watch,” he replied.

Dairine grabbed for the branch again, jumping this time to get a boost. She swung her legs up and managed to hook a knee around it, thanking the Powers that Be that she chose to wear jeans. With no small amount of struggling, huffing, puffing, and a moment of brief terror that Spot might fall out of her bag, Dairine got herself up on the first branch. After that, it was a quick climb to where Darryl was, maybe fifteen feet above her.

“Nice spot,” she said when she had situated herself firmly on a branch just across from Darryl.

“Yeah, I like it,” Darryl said, patting the bark fondly. “Acerla’s really nice about people climbing her. She’s caught me a few times when I’ve almost fallen.”

The leaves of the maple fluttered slightly, despite there being no breeze. “Always a pleasure to shelter the young ones,” Acerla said.

“Thanks, Ace.” Darryl hugged the trunk.

The leaves fluttered happily.

“So, what’s going on with your Wizpod, then?” Dairine asked, looping an arm around the trunk to keep herself stable.

Darryl’s sunny mood dropped so quickly it was like a cloud had passed overhead. He dug in his pocket for a moment and drew out the device. “First it slowed way down, like there would be a lag after I touched an icon before anything happened. Then I started getting weird error messages that didn’t match up with anything I was trying to do. I called you when it crashed altogether.”  

“What kind of error messages?” Darine asked.

“Well, I was trying to play music, and it said ‘can’t start transcript daemon’, which is weird because I wasn’t doing anything with the transcription function. Things like that.” Darryl sighed. “I don’t want it to be broken. What if it glitches out during a spell? Not even that, but I rely on it a lot, you know? Not just for wizard stuff, for life stuff. There’s a communication app on there I use on my more nonverbal days, and I have spells for blocking out bad noises or transcribing what people say so if I can’t understand them I can read it.”

Darryl leaned over and passed the Wizpod to Dairine. She took it carefully, realizing that it was more than just a Manual or music player, but a big part of Darryl’s life. “Let’s see what we can do.”

It looked like an ordinary iPod, and when Dairine hit the power switch, it turned on and revealed a perfectly ordinary screen of apps. She frowned. There should have been Manual functions visible.

“Oh, sorry,” Darryl said, “I keep it in _sevarfrith_ mode by default so no one pokes into the wizard stuff by accident.” He took it back and tapped a few things, and when he handed it back, there were new icons on the screen. “Transit Options”, read one that had an icon of a stylized Star Trek transporter. “Manual Archives” read another, with an open book icon.

“Is it okay if I open up the music player?” Dairine asked. “You said that it was having problems with that.”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

Dairine tapped the music note icon, and nothing happened.

“Give it a bit,” Darryl said.

Sure enough, after about fifteen seconds, the app opened. “Yeesh, that’s not good,” Dairine mumbled. “Not even a nonwizardly first-generation device should take that long.” She tapped a song, and instead of playing it, a chime sounded and an error popped up on the screen. “Unable to parse coordinates,” the message said.

“What were you doing right before you noticed this happening?” Dairine asked. “Did you change any settings, or put anything new on here?”

Darryl shook his head. “I just turned it on this morning and it was doing that.”

“Okay, maybe it updated overnight. Spot, come out here please.”

Dairine handed the Wizpod back to Darryl and balanced Spot on her knees. Spot helpfully extended a few legs and gripped hers, freeing her hands to do other things than cling to him. She took the Wizpod again and scrolled through some of the settings, looking for version numbers and comparing them to Manual software changelogs and bug reports that Spot found for her.

“Aha,” Dairine said after about ten minutes.

Darryl perked up. “Did you find something?”

“Yeah, it looks like an update went out early this morning, but there was a typo in it so it broke some stuff. They patched it right away, but on some devices, it broke the auto-update that would have delivered the patch.”

“You can fix it?”

“Yeah, just as simple as updating it.” Dairine squinted at the screen. “I don’t like the looks of some of these bugs, though, so I’ll have Spot hold a backup image of your Wizpod while we update, just in case. Better safe than sorry.”

It was a bit of a fight to get the Wizpod to update — eventually Spot had to download the update himself and sprout a cable to transfer it over.

“Interesting, it looks like Spot is running the bad update too,” Dairine said while the patch was transferring. “I should take a look at what it says for his model…”

Sure enough, in a list of known bugs was the line “Unit may lose precision in temperature monitoring and report cooler temperatures than actual.”

“You really have been cold all day, huh buddy?” She said, patting Spot.

“You’re warm,” Spot said simply.

“Do I need to turn off auto-update?” Darryl asked.

“No, that’s not the problem,” Dairine replied. “See, what happened is we’re both running the nightly build, which means it updates every day with whatever changes were made since yesterday’s. Some scatterbrained developer just broke the build. Anyway, I’m on nightly because I’m into having the cutting edge; I don’t know why you were. You’re not really part of that user base. I’ll switch it over to stable updates only and you should be okay.”

Darryl had a slightly far-off look in his eyes. Dairine wasn’t sure if he was bilocating or if her explanation had just gone a bit over his head. “Once it’s updated, I’ll tweak the settings so you only get good updates from now on.”

“Thanks, Dair,” Darryl said. “Is it okay if I call you that?”

“Sure thing. Can I call you Darr?”

Darryl nodded. “Dair and Darr. That’s great.”

“Dare you to say it ten times fast,” Dairine said.

“Dair and Darr and dares and Dair and Darr and dares… Not much of a challenge to it. Not like ‘unique New York’ or ‘toy boat’.”

Spot tapped Dairine’s leg to get her attention. “Oh, looks like it’s done.” She unplugged the Wizpod and passed it to Darryl. “Take a look, see how it’s doing now.”

Darryl tapped something and swiped the screen a few times. “Well, it's actually doing what I ask it to, so that's nice,” he said, then frowned. His mouth opened and he looked like he was going to say something, but he shook his head and closed it again. He tapped a few more things, and a synthesized voice came out of the speakers. “I don’t like it. My communication app looks different now.”

Dairine wanted to roll her eyes, then mentally chastised herself for the thought. “They changed it so it sucks” was the most common complaint she had to deal with when she did tech support for others, but for Darryl, consistency was probably a lot more important. “Well, the great thing about having wizards write your software is you get a lot more flexibility than stock models. Point out what’s changed, and I’ll see if I can swap it back for you.”

“Hey!” An angry voice interrupted them. “Get down from there!”

Dairine and Darryl both jumped. They looked down, and saw an angry man glaring up at them. Dairine thought she recognized him as a parent of one of the brats running around the playground. “That’s not a climbing tree! Get down right now!”

“The tree is fine with it, why should we listen to you?” Dairine grumbled under her breath, but she put Spot away.

“I said now!” The man yelled.

“Screaming at us won’t make us climb faster!” Dairine yelled right back.

“Just let it go, Dair. We’ll fine another spot,” Darryl said quietly as he climbed down.

Dairine was still angry when they hit the ground, and completely ignored the angry man lecturing them about sap trees and bark damage. “Come on Darr, let’s find somewhere else where we won’t offend some tree-hugger’s delicate sensibilities.”

“But hugging trees is nice!” Darryl followed Dairine despite the protest over terminology.

“Who does he think he is, anyway? I’ve climbed trees in this park loads of times!” Dairine ranted.

“Come on Dair, it’s not worth getting heated up over. Wanna go get milkshakes or something?”

“I… Sure.” Dairine took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah, milkshakes sound good. Nothing like some liquid ice cream to get over the fact that some people just can’t appreciate some perfectly healthy tree climbing.”

There was a little fast food place nearby, and to Dairine’s relief, no one decided to make a big deal out of two kids getting dessert before dinner. They carried their shakes to a park bench and sat down. Darryl pointed out what had changed in his Wizpod, and Dairine fixed it.

“So what’s the difference between yours and mine?” Darryl asked, gesturing between Spot and his Wizpod. “Spot talks to you and he’s obviously sentient, but mine just reads stuff out loud if I tell it to.”

Spot, who was currently impersonating a perfectly normal laptop, whirred.

“Hoo boy, that’s a big question,” Dairine said, looking up from adjusting the position of a few buttons in the transit app. “The short version is, I accidentally plugged him into a sentient planet on my Ordeal and we became parents to the Mobiles - an entire race of silicon turtle babies.”

Darryl blinked slowly. “I don’t know if I actually want the long version or not.”

That made Dairine laugh. “Basically, I got to beta test one of the first electronic manuals. The early versions of the Manual software talked to you and changed depending on how you talked to it. Spot had already learned my syntax and was having conversations with me before we plugged into the Motherboard and synced our respective brains. I think they changed the Manual software to be more like a regular computer after that — there’s less chance of accidental Genesis if it’s not already partially sapient to begin with.”

“Ah.” Darryl didn’t seem to know how to respond. “So… No chance of my Wizpod talking back to me, then?”

Dairine blinked. “Everything will talk to you, just not all in the same way. We're wizards, after all. Why, do you want it to be like Spot?” She pondered it. “I doubt I could get clearance to make your Wizpod like Spot, but we could always see if one of the Mobiles wouldn’t mind hanging out with you…”

Darryl laughed. “You know, that actually sounds pretty nice. Could ask it to double check my spelling and I’d always have someone to talk to. Turtles, huh? Wonder if I could make it look like a plushie or a backpack.”

“Next time I ‘phone home’, so to speak, I’ll bring it up, see what I can do.”

“That would be nifty.”

Once Darryl’s Wizpod was back to normal, they threw out their empty milkshake cups and wandered back to the park.

Dairine and Darryl decided to just sit in Acerla’s shade this time, unwilling to risk the ire of random angry adults who had very strong feelings about children climbing trees.

Dairine settled against the trunk and looked up, and was surprised to see Darryl waving at her from in the branches before vanishing. She looked beside her, where Darryl hadn’t moved.

“So what’s up with that?” She asked.

“Stealth spell. He can’t yell at me for being up there if he can’t see me.”

“I see.” Dairine closed her eyes and tried to relax, just enjoying the pleasant weather, the satisfaction of a successfully troubleshot tech support job, and the company of a friend. She couldn’t do it. “So is the cloaked double in the tree your way to get back at that guy? I like your style.”

Darryl snorted. “No, it’s not like that. It’s…” He rubbed his face with his hands. “It’s hard to explain this to someone who can’t bilocate. If I’m somewhere quiet, it’s easier to be somewhere loud. So if I’m getting overloaded or having a bad day, I can just be in the tree at the same time I’m doing regular stuff, and that makes it a little easier. Helps keep me from totally melting down.”

Dairine looked from Darryl beside her to the branches above where another Darryl was hiding. “Has it been that bad of a day for you?” She asked softly.

“Kind of, yeah.” Darryl stared at the grass between his shoes and plucked at it idly. “I freaked out when my Wizpod stopped working, and it was already a bad sensory day to begin with. You helped, though, fixing the Wizpod and just hanging out with me.”

“I wish I had known,” Dairine said. “Heck, you were so chill when that guy started yelling at us, I had no idea.”

Darryl shrugged, still looking at the grass. “Sometimes it’s just easier to pretend I’m okay than it is to deal with people trying to help me.” He scoffed. “You were good. You helped me with what I asked and didn’t try to take over everything.”

“People do that to you, huh?”

“Yep.”

They sat in silence for a while, just watching the world go by.

“If I ever do that to you, feel free to just smack me,” Dairine said finally. “Same goes for Nita or Kit or any of us. You can always be yourself around us.”

Darryl didn’t reply right away. He pulled his Wizpod out of his pocket, tapped a few things, and the synthesized voice said “thank you.” He used the Wizpod to say “can I please have a hug?”

“Sure thing, Darr.” Dairine opened her arms, and Darryl launched himself at her, burying his head in her shoulder. She held on to him tight, and he said “thanks Dair” in her ear.

“May I have a warm hug too?” Spot asked from his spot in Dairine’s bag.

Dair and Darr laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the lovely [Geekhyena](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Geekhyena/pseuds/Geekhyena) for beta'ing for me and making sure I kept things kosher with Darryl and his autism.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Dare to Care: The Debonair Affair of Darr and Dair [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2194188) by [MayContainBlueberries](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MayContainBlueberries/pseuds/MayContainBlueberries)




End file.
